seasonal – Page 15

Hyacinths – favourite flowers this time of the year & have some glögi

Hyacinths are traditional, popular and well-loved Christmas plants or flowers in Finland. And they have been my favourites ever since my childhood.

It’s the scent! The lovely and nostalgic scent of the Christmastime! The hyacinth in these pics is my first hyacinth for this year. The adorable scent started to appear on Tuesday. 🙂

Naturally the look of hyacinths is charming and lovable, too…

…many tiny flowers, and some colour yellow as well! 🙂

The flowers speak for themselves…

And it’s the time for glögi! :

Glögi is a traditional, hot and spiced drink. It’s mainly a Christmas (and pre-Christmas) drink in Finland. It can be translated as mulled wine. However, not all the glögi drinks are like wine – alcoholic drinks – some are, but, actually, we drink a lot of juice glögi in Finland, so… glögi is… glögi in Finland. As a non-alcoholic drink it’s some fruit or berry juice, hot and spiced. This one that I’m having is grape, blackcurrant and blueberry juice, spiced with cinnamon, bitter orange peel, cloves, cardamom and ginger – all the traditional Christmas or winter spices. Glögi can be bought ready-made – that’s probably why the juice glögi is so popular. 🙂

I think there will be still more glögi and hyacinths in my blog and on my Instagram over the next few weeks… 🙂

-Leena

Sunshine and snow

The first snow has fallen. Snow – it feels soft to the touch and under one’s feet, but also makes the whole atmosphere everywhere soft, and magical. 🙂

The first three pics I took yesterday.

A garden bunny – a happy bunny.

And yet another wonderful thing about November; it’s the season of Spanish persimmons! Persimmons are one of my favourite fruits. They are so delicious, sweet, juicy, quite big… 🙂

The strawflowers meet snow now! 😀 They have closed their rustling petals…

Last Sunday, late in the evening, by the lake Pyhäjärvi. The fairly red half moon and the moon glade were just beautiful…

Still following the spiders…? Yes… I am… 😉

A cat paw print… whether it’s summer or winter, our cats enjoy getting outside.

The last pot marigold or calendula flowers today… 🙂

-Leena

Dark & cold, cosy fires & lights, and creating dream home

The campfire owl here again… 🙂 We’ve had already many campfires in our garden this autumn, too, but I usually just relax and enjoy them without my camera or my phone, but on Friday, late in the evening, I had the inspiration for taking some pics, too. (A pic on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) as well.)

Campfires in the garden are a part of my, our, dream home…

So, we have lived in this house for almost two and a half years now. But I still had one part of my belongings in Turku – as I was going on and on here in my blog last summer. 🙂 But since the end of August it has been only this, our country home, for me… and I love it! But this has been quite far from my (or our) dream home; almost everything, every thing, is in the wrong place here inside our home, only like the bookshelf and drawers are in the right spots, there are many untidy and disorganized spots in our home, and partly, naturally, because I brought so many things and pieces of furniture from Turku as well, and so on, and so on… Creating our dream home here now is not about renovating (we have done that, too – more about it later, in some other blog posts, too) and creating our dream home is not, heaven forbid, about buying anything, oh dear… yes, maybe buying some new candles and even more houseplants, but nothing more now… Creating our dream home is now about organizing, tidying up and cleaning up our home – it’s “a bit” of chaos here now… and almost all of our large windows still are without curtains, just window blinds are there… But yes, the only way to start the project for me was, first emptying, then cleaning and organizing, our garage, which definitely is not a place for our car, but for other useful things. 😉

And when we had some room for big items in the garage after rearranging, we removed a big pile of long wooden boards from the middle of our kitchen – they were taking over one third of the floor space there, so we didn’t have a kitchen table and chairs there for a year and a half, or so. (We were renovating some ceilings and walls…)

I now have a tag creating dream home here in my blog, so I’ll be posting, with pics, too, about the project here and there…

Morning coffee yesterday. And a satsuma! It’s the season of Spanish satsumas again! So juicy and delicious, and cheap. 🙂

Under the oak tree…

The strawflowers again! 😀 And they are still opening and closing their rustling petals, with the days and nights…

Yesterday evening, now this was in my dream kitchen. 😉 – Finally the big pile of long wooden boards is out and the kitchen table and the chairs are there! And the table and the chairs are the ones I had already in Turku. 🙂 I’ve been dreaming of candlelights in the dark evenings in the kitchen… warm and cosy… And the light of the warm oven can be seen in the pic, too – I was waiting for home-made thin and crisp barley breads to become ready.

Living candlelights in lanterns outside in the dark… and this lantern can also be seen from the kitchen window when sitting at the table. 🙂

One more pic of the Friday evening’s campfire to end this blog post… and to celebrate the dark and cold, bewitching evenings and nights! 😉

-Leena

Growing tomatoes

This is what’s been happening this year: we have grown tomatoes for the first time, we started the pre-growing too late, but we’ve got some delicious red tomatoes to eat. The pre-growing should have started already in March or at the beginning of April. I don’t remember when exactly our tomato seeds were planted, but it was like May already… 🙂

The pre-growing happened in small containers inside our house and the pre-grown tiny plants, seedlings, were then planted outside, in buckets with drainage holes in the bottom. The buckets were placed to our vegetable garden – the all day sunny spot between our house and the woods. The wall of our home was sheltering the plants a bit. When it was sometimes raining too much, we carried the plant buckets inside our house. Everything went fine – the plants or their soil didn’t get any mold. – One just has to carefully keep an eye on the plants – when to water them, and how much. And tomatoes like fertilizing, we always use organic fertilizers.

And oh yes, I just love the scent of tomato plants! 🙂

I took this pic on October 3rd. This was the last day our tomatoes were outside – the upper parts of the plants had finally been frozen at night (and the plants were like all gone, the next day, October 4th). We noticed that our tomatoes actually did like a bit cooler air – they were ripening so well in autumn – they started ripening with the combination of cool air and warm sunlight. And it really was so wonderful that we had so summery September for our tomatoes… because we were so late with the planting. 😀 But oh yes, these home-grown ripe tomatoes that we now have had – they’ve tasted so delicious, sweet… they are miraculous! 🙂

Tomatoes do turn red and fully ripen without the main body of the plant, inside the house (and tomatoes do ripen without apples, and so on… 😉 ). The already red tomatoes, that are ripening to be eaten, we have kept on a table in kitchen.

But the first ripening of our tomatoes – the green tomatoes turning red, happens in the cool and dark sauna in our home. And when the sauna is heated, we take the tomatoes to kitchen.

Our biggest tomato for this year, I took it outside for pics… 🙂

So, now we know what to do in March next year!

-Leena

More October

Just some more October pics, from last weekend and past few days, in our garden…

In the backyard again…

October strawberry… In a pot. We thought this plant already died in the summer, but it started to grow again… but still ripe strawberries for this year…? – Not gonna happen. 🙂

One tough cornflower. I’ve been visiting this flower regularly during this autumn – and it’s just always there! It’s been facing downwards already for a while. But it’s still there. 🙂

Backyard trees again – more pine trees, two apple trees, a birch tree, a bigger rowan and one other yellow Norway Maple…

And one sturdy annual mallow! This flower hasn’t fully opened up, and it, too, has already been facing downwards, but it’s been there for ages. 😀

Some lovely yellow tiny flowers spotted in our carrot field…

Under our bigger oak tree…

Our smaller oak tree. 🙂

Dill, too, was still growing nicely in the ground, despite the cold at nights. Now I’ve picked most of them, some we ate, the rest are drying.

Still some tiny single viola flowers in the pots… Two of them in the pics here, symbols of boldness and strength – in the beginning, these plants were here and here. – Oh dear… 🙂

Some October fern…

My next blog post will be about growing tomatoes. 🙂

-Leena

Coffee, pink flowers, blackberries

Today’s morning coffee pic along with some more pics of pink flowers, taken lately and today, and a couple of pics with blackberries in them. – Pics in the still very warm September here in Finland. 🙂

Other one of my upper eyelids is a bit red, very swollen and somewhat sore today, it started already yesterday. My boyfriend had the same thing a while ago. But my eyelid is a lot more swollen than his was. Nice. Just taking it easy today…

These two flowers I met amongst the shaggy ink caps. We haven’t planted these. I’m not even sure what these actually are – they look a bit like tiny, and somewhat dark-coloured annual mallows, though… 🙂

Blackberries! And I’ve missed almost everyone of them, when it comes to taking pics. 😀 – I’ve just been eating… We planted the blackberry bush in our garden last year. This year we’ve gotten many berries, so juicy and delicious.

Dasiphora fruticosa or shrubby cinquefoil, ‘pink paradise‘. We planted the bush a couple of weeks ago.

A tiny bush to fill the empty space ( a bit too big, and not to be seen wholly in the pic) in the middle of our garden. – This is a start… 🙂 Very flowery shrubs are shrubby cinquefoils in autumn…

And these old friends today:

Annual mallow, one more pic…

And a bit of cosmos…

-Leena

Mushrooms

I absolutely love mushrooms! And mushroom hunting. Self-picked mushrooms and self-prepared food with them are something totally different from the canned mushrooms that we meet on pizzas, for example… – No wonder many people believe that they don’t like mushrooms at all… 🙂

And probably we all know how dangerous mushrooms can be – that is a fact indeed! We, me and my boyfriend, got our first facts on mushroom hunting, and bolete mushrooms or porcini mushrooms in particular, when we were mushroom hunting for the first time, with my boyfriend’s father in Eastern Finland. After that we have used a mushroom guide book and the internet, both. 🙂

This blog post of mine is not a proper guide to these two types of mushrooms that I have in the pics below, so don’t eat mushrooms based only on knowledge you get from here! – I’m just having a bit of fun with mushrooms here in this blog post, with a little bit of information! 🙂

The first five pics I took on our front yard on Friday.

We have numerous shaggy ink caps on our front yard every year. They have their own special place there. 🙂 Shaggy ink caps are quite charming and funny mushrooms; they have many phases when it comes to their appearance.

First they are just white, short and chubby ‘trunks’. Then they grow to be tall and thin mushrooms with a proper cap, which then starts to melt away, to dissolve, to drip down, as black liquid or ‘ink’.

These mushrooms are edible when they are very young and white, that mushroom in the pic above is already too old. We have never eaten these, but they say, these are quite good edible mushrooms when they are young.

This ‘ink’ of shaggy ink caps actually was used as ink in days of old. 🙂

Ink dried up?

The rest of the pics I took on Saturday night, after a walk in the forest. – We came out of the forest with our hands full of woolly milkcaps.

Fluffy mushrooms! Cute and delightful! 🙂

Woolly milkcaps are fully edible, but they must be boiled, and they must be boiled longer than some other mushrooms. Woolly milkcaps must be boiled about 20-30 minutes. The taste of raw woolly milkcaps is strongly bitter and raw woolly milkcaps don’t agree with one’s stomach, at all. Cooking, boiling and rinsing the mushrooms removes the poison from them. The taste of woolly milkcaps after boiling them is very delicious! We cooked a creamy sauce with these.

Mushrooms always have funny and cunning names. In Finnish, for example, this woolly milkcap has two names – other one of them is karvalaukku – fur bag, literally. 🙂

-Leena